The report outlines some of the suggestions student participants have offered for improving the use of educational technology in their schools, including: greater access to Web tools and lessons in electronic formats, such as PowerPoint presentations and podcasts; use of educational games and simulations; and links to videoconferences from subject-area experts.

Students, the report argues, are trendsetters in using technology in their personal lives and, more recently, to organize and complete schoolwork.

QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can contain any alphanumeric text and that often feature URLs that direct users to sites where they can learn about an object or place (a practice known as “mobile tagging”).

The greatest importance of QR codes could lie not in their specific use but in the opportunities they offer for moving away from keyboards as input devices in learning environments.

providing on-the-spot access to descriptive language and online resources for objects and locations.

MIT's faculty members last week decided on a new policy to make all of their scholarly articles available free to the public online.

Faculty members voted unanimously to adopt the new policy, which is in effect now.

"The vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas,"

Es wundert mich eigentlich, dass bei diesem riesigen Angebot an guten Bildern noch nicht mehr Verlage und Redaktionen auf dieses Angebot zurückgreifen. Wahrscheinlich ist der Wissensstand rund um das Thema Creative Commons immernoch nicht stark genug in den Köpfen vieler Onlineredakteure verbreitet. Vom Printbereich ganz zu schweigen.

there remain fundamental flaws with Blackboard’s (and virtually every other CMS provider’s) underlying infrastructure. For all of the new window dressing, Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools “inside the moat” and outside of it “in the cloud.”

rapidly growing number of people are creating their own personal learning environments with tools freely available to them, without the benefit of a CMS. As Christensen would say, they have hired different technologies to do the job of a CMS for them

the really valuable learning technologies will increasily be in the cloud.

Our readings for this upcoming week’s meetings have all been chosen by you and your classmates in our FSEM workshop.

This well-selected item offers an analytical framework to consider and raises relevant questions for our discussion of the other articles and links listed below. Key themes include objects and toys, their relationship with the formation of identity, and our own explorations of the object, toys, and playthings that children (and adults) share.

Still, Smoker was worried that the video would be taken out of context, and he called it a "rude awakening." He contacted the student, who has since graduated, to ask that it be taken down.

So the clip is "a little upsetting," Smoker said, "because I do teach mostly seniors, and they know what the policy is. To do a sneaky video like this was out of line."

While I applaud these innovations as good steps in the right direction, there remain fundamental flaws with Blackboard’s (and virtually every other CMS provider’s) underlying infrastructure. For all of the new window dressing, Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools “inside the moat” and outside of it “in the cloud.

Probably the most significant development in the last ten years for the new direction of Personal Learning Networks has been the deployment of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) – that allowed content creators to syndicate their writings and other creations. Using RSS feed readers, web users do not go to web pages or search for content, but rather, subscribe to RSS feeds and let the content come to them.

I am reminded of Franz Kafka’s “An Old Manuscript,” an account of a nomadic army arriving in an imperial city. The nomads arrive suddenly, surprising the urban population and appearing without warning in city streets, markets, libraries, and homes. Kafka’s tale focuses on the incomprehension of the city-dwellers, as well as on their dogged willingness to attempt living life as if the nomads simply weren’t there. The story charts their progressive decay and their slipping grasp on reality while the nomads build a new civilization literally in their front yard. It’s a very funny story, in Kafka’s unique way, but of course it’s also a cautionary tale, especially for those of us in higher education. At colleges and universities around the world, the nomadic swarms are already arriving.

It took digital-divide researchers a whole decade to figure out that the real issue is not so much about access to digital technology but about the benefits derived from access.

80/20 factor” (in which eighty percent of profit is made by serving the most affluent 20%) causes technology designers to work hard at creating "solutions" specifically for the affluent. The poor are ignored because market forces assume that designing solutions for them will not be profitable*. The result is that even where the poor are provided access to digital technology, it is low-quality and merely “localized” versions of products and services intended for the rich.

1) Closing the Digital Divide is a precondition for reducing poverty.

Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid

I mean academia’s policy that enforces an unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual divide. What intellectual divide? It is that gaping chasm between two opposing models of disseminating knowledge: toll access and open access.

lack of access to technology (dubbed the "digital divide") seriously handicaps half the world's population. That is a giant problem but one being gradually ameliorated by mobile telephony and economic forces.